PowerPoint 2008 for the Mac is, unequivocally, an improvement over PowerPoint 2004. I finally managed to pick up a copy last month, and I’ve been putting the software through its paces looking for improvements over its predecessor as well as for areas in which the application can still grow. As a disclaimer, I should admit that I usually use Keynote as my slide software, and PowerPoint only comes out when the situation demands it. I’m not as familiar with PowerPoint as I need to be for a detailed review, so view this entry as a simple overview of my impressions as I worked with PowerPoint 2008.

A Whole New Look

The first thing I noticed when launching the new version of PowerPoint is that the application sports a new look. Unlike PowerPoint 2004, it looks like it belongs on the Mac. The previous version sported numerous floating toolbars, had no option to view slides as thumbnails, and had a great deal of nonstandard interface elements. PowerPoint 2008 goes a long way towards fixing many of the interface oddities that have been part of PowerPoint for Mac since Office 2001.




Toolbars in PowerPoint 2004 and PowerPoint 2008


Slide navigation in PPT 2004 and PPT 2008

The interface still has its problems. Some toolbars still float, and the Formatting Palette may behave strangely with Exposé and Spaces, but PowerPoint on the Mac now looks like an application rather than a collection of unconnected toolbars and windows that happen to talk to one another. It’s a big step in the right direction.

Notable Improvements and Additions

As Office 2007 for Windows sports a new Ribbon interface, Office 2008 for Mac gains the Element Gallery, a top-level place to find things like slide themes, transitions, slide masters, charts, and Word Art. Any elements you choose form the gallery are immediately applied to your current slide to let you see exactly how it will look. By default, the Elements Gallery displays in orange, which can be visually distracting, but you can change the appearance to graphite in the application preferences.



The Elements Gallery in orange and graphite.

The Formatting Palette has also seen some improvements, but the tool (while a welcome alternative to multiple toolbars) is growing cluttered. The Object Palette has added more shapes and can now directly access the Clip Art library without opening a separate application, and the Custom Animation Palette makes it easier to manipulate text and image builds while avoiding dialog boxes. I’m also a fan of the updated Reference Tools which let you search Encarta and bilingual dictionaries among the usual sources.

PowerPoint 2008 features new styles for images that seem to be a direct reaction to the way Keynote handles images. The image features leapfrog what Keynote is capable of but some of the flexibility is not readily apparent.


Quickly adding an image effect.

I use Picturesque to prepare images like this for use in Keynote, but PowerPoint 2008 all but negates the need for a third-party image editor to add fanciful styles and effects to your images. The only drawback comes with fine-tuning the images, which requires opening a separate dialog box. Fortunately, the adjustments you make in the dialog box happen to the image live, so it could be worse.

The final great bit about PowerPoint 2008? As you can see in the screenshots of the Slide Navigator, PowerPoint now supports widescreen presentations without having to manually adjust slide proportions. This is a good thing in my book.

Quibbles and Bits

PowerPoint 2008 is not without its problems, but whatever drawbacks there are stay pretty minor.

• Microsoft still loves dialog boxes. The situation is improving, but anytime a dialog box opens, part of your work is obscured.
• Transitions are not as smoothly animated as Keynote’s, and many happen too fast by default.
• Floating toolbars look even more out-of-place now that the main application window has been fixed.
• Changes made to one master slide in a presentation affects all master slides.
• Toolbars and palettes often do not function correctly in Spaces.

Conclusion

While it hasn’t made a convert out of me, PowerPoint 2008 is a strong upgrade to the application. It clearly sets a foundation upon which Microsoft can build a better user experience than previous versions of PowerPoint. If you use PowerPoint regularly, I recommend picking up Office 2008. If you’ve been dealing with PowerPoint 2004 running under Rosetta on an Intel Mac, you will see performance improvements. However, if you’re a Keynote user who only occasionally needs PowerPoint, visit a nearby Apple Store first and try it out first to see if the improvements are compelling to you.

Tags: software

Presentation Zen: Lessons from the art of storyboarding

From the entry:

A good storyboard artist is a good storyteller. The drawings do not have to be pretty, but they must have the meaning and the feelings behind the idea. A good storyboard artist is a good pitchman.

KeynoteUser: K09 Tip: Multi-color gradients

This is a great tip on using Keynote’s new tool for advanced gradients. I hadn’t even noticed this as I’ve worked with Keynote ’09.

Tags: keynote, software, garr reynolds

Many moons ago, I wrote about Google Presentations and Ulteo's online implementation of OpenOffice Impress, but I haven't had too much time to point out other web services since then. Of course, Preezo and Zoho Show are sitting in my bookmarks, waiting for evaluation, but I thought I'd take a moment to point out some other neat web applications that presenters might be interested in.

Online Photo Editing

Two websites really stand out in my mind under this category. Picnik and Photoshop Express.

Picnik


Picnik was the first online photo editor I was exposed to, and, to an extent, it's still my favorite. It has several editing tools and integrates with several photo hosting sites such as Flickr, Facebook, and Picasa – allowing you to browse photos uploaded to those sites without having to navigate away from Picnik. You can also upload photos stored on your computer.

From Picnik, you can add text (with many font options), shapes, and numerous effects to your photos. There is a $25/year subscription if you want even more feautres, but the free account should suffice for most. The only thing I hold against Picnik are the ads that clutter the screen in a free account.

Photoshop Express


While not quite as feature-packed as Picnik, Photoshop Express offers a much smoother, ad-free interface for working. Like Picnik, it integrates with popular image hosting sites, and it allows users to show off photographs in galleries. The experience of using Photoshop Express is very pleasant, and I could see this supplanting Picnik as my online tool of choice with the addition of a few more filters.

The only major concern right now is limited image format support.

Document Sharing

I've referred to Scribd as YouTube for documents, and I still can't think of a better way to describe it.



Scribd lets you share documents (and slides) online through a Flash-based PDF viewer, allowing for tags, comments, and even embedding. It's simple to use and of clear benefit to presenters wanting to share their handouts as broadly and easily as possible.

Slide Sharing

A couple new services have recently come to my attention that allow for slide creation and sharing over the Internet, ShowBeyond and SlideRocket.

ShowBeyond


ShowBeyond is an easy-to-use site that allows you to upload images and audio to create a small slidecast. You are limited to 24 slides, which seems a reasonable limitation, but the toolset seems more appropriate for the trip-to-Florida type slideshow over an actual presentation. Still, it's a good site for creating simple presentations or photo slides.

SlideRocket


SlideRocket is currently in private beta, and I haven't been accepted (yet) to try it out. Regardless, the site's tour makes SlideRocket look like a serious contender in the arena of web presentations (just so long as they don't cripple free accounts too much). This could turn out to be a very impressive product, and I'm excited to give it a spin.

Just take a look at this demonstration:


I'm sure there are many more fun and exciting web applications I either haven't discovered yet or just haven't had time to explore, but these should keep you busy for a while. Be sure to let me know of any online tools you use and want me to know about!

Tags: software, online tools

So this is a little later than promised, but I doubt any of you mind. I hope everyone has had a nice week of holidays and family gatherings – if not this last week, then recently.

Anyway, I've been spending some time with the online incarnation of OpenOffice as served by Ulteo. Oversimplifying the process, because OpenOffice relies heavily on Java for much of its functionality and because Java can be run within a browser window, it is therefore possible to run OpenOffice in its entirety in a browser. It's an interesting and surprisingly competent implementation of the productivity suite, but I can't say I'm ready for it to replace my desktop tools at this point.

To use OpenOffice online, you have to create an account with Ulteo, which should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with using online applications. Once you login to your account, a launch interface appears with some general settings.


do they really need to check these settings every time?

The weird thing is that even though I chose English on this screen as my primary language, I had to remind the spell checker of this fact later. Hopefully that was just a bug that will soon be smoothed over. This launch page would be fine if it didn't load so slowly. The hang-up seems to be with an unsigned certificate, and this affected each browser I tested (IE 7, Camino, and Safari).

Once past the launch screen, a document wizard appears if you launch Impress. (Writer mercifully opens straight into a blank document.) The Presentation WIzard is pretty much the same as that found in OpenOffice, and you can select to never have it bother you again – though I've experienced it forgetting this setting occasionally.


a wizard, of course

Once past the wizard, OpenOffice online sports a surprisingly complete interface for designing and delivering presentations – complete with menus, toolbars, slide organizer, and task pane. I recommend that you leave everything exactly as it's laid out, though. I experienced some serious redraw issues when moving things around.


it looks just like the desktop version!

There are even separate interfaces for creating charts, graphs, and spreadsheets. The application features a full compliment of animations and transitions for text and slides, differentiating it from Google Presentations. There is also a deep set of preferences and support for keyboard commands. You can even use OpenOffice online to display your presentations, but, just like with the Google application, your slides will appear in a browser window that will not fill the screen.

The online OpenOffice features limited collaboration through screen sharing by invite (pictured below) but nothing comparable to the deeper collaboration tools provided by Google Apps.



Also, the online version of Impress supports all of the formats the desktop version does when it comes to saving, including .ppt and .pdf. This allows you to save a document in the format of your choice and download it to be viewed by a desktop application. Unfortunately, the file manager is pretty clunky compared to Google Apps, and my saved document did not appear until I signed out and then back in.

Other problems include generally slow performance and occasional visual bugs. The application also wants to customize your cursor for some strange reason, but the implementation behaves inconsistently. Finally, I ran into some issues retrieving my sample document. Opening it in the online version of Impress after saving it previously resulted in this mess:


attack of the green stars!

Saving the deck as a PowerPoint file and downloading it yielded only slightly better results. The background is noticeably different, and the graph is detected as an image, unable to be edited. On the other hand, PowerPoint retained all animations and transitions included in the original file. Results are similar if you open the PowerPoint file in Keynote.



All said, Ulteo's online OpenOffice project is quite impressive, but the flaws add up quickly. While none would probably be deal breakers by themselves, taken as a whole, they damage the usefulness of these online tools. In terms of features and depth, Ulteo is on to something here. If they can squash the numerous performance issues, streamline their own management interface some, beef up the collaboration features, and fine tune the reliability of this application, they may have a winner. Until then, Impress online is a fascinating novelty but no more.

For more, you may be interested in my own overview of NeoOffice Impress (a derivative work of OpenOffice Impress) that I posted earlier this year.

Tags: online tools, software

Here's a quick tidbit for those interested in online tools. A company called Ulteo has released an online version of OpenOffice. It requires a free registration to use, but what doesn't these days? Here's a shot of OpenOffice Impress in action.



The product is still in beta, but it shows some interesting potential. I have a very busy week ahead of me, so I'll try to put some first impressions together next weekend. Be sure to check back!

Tags: software, online tools

Recently, Google has added an online presentation application in addition to their word processing and spreadsheet applications. Google Presentations is an interesting experience in that it is capable of more than I expected, but, depending on the features you are looking for, it may still not do enough. I took some time testing Google Presentations in Camino (a Mac-specific Firefox derivation) to see how things work. Please note that Google does not fully support Safari at this time in its productivity tools. I had no problems using Safari, but your mileage may vary.

Basic Features

I've never used Google's online productivity tools before. I have certainly been aware of their existence, but I had never seen them in action. As a result, some of the features I cover may be familiar to users of Google Docs and Spreadsheets – such as the document manager.

I was pleasantly surprised to see how efficiently Google manages the documents created with their online apps. Managing your documents is very similar to managing an online email account, and opening a specific document takes you directly to the corresponding online application. In Camino, the document opens in a new tab, leaving the other documents easily accessible. I don't know what I was expecting when it came to document management, but this feature comes as a pleasant surprise.

Once in the presentation application, the abilities and the limitations are immediately visible. You can perform basic text editing on your slides including font, size, color, highlight, lists, and alignment, but I had no luck editing already formatted text. (This may not be the case in other browsers.) It seems you have to plan ahead when it comes to formatting, or be prepared to type a few things over. You can include hyperlinks in your presentation, which can be especially useful since the presentation will already be in a browser when displayed. It's also very easy to save your slides as well as duplicate and delete individual slides. In fact, I found the Duplicate command quite useful, but we'll revisit that in a few paragraphs.

When creating your presentation, Google offers a few basic slide layouts and themes. When you choose to insert a new slide, a dialog appears offering you the available templates. You'll notice none of the slides have placeholders for images, and this is because there is no clip art or word art available in Google Presentations. On the other hand, you can upload your own images for use in the presentation, negating this limitation. Image uploads can also be used for inserting charts and graphs if you export them as images or take screenshots of them.


A similar box appears if you want to choose a new theme. Here are some of the designs available for your presentations:



The themes are very reminiscent of PowerPoint, and those used to the Microsoft-designed themes of that program will feel right at home. However, those looking for something a little more refined will be left wanting. Shelly, Blank, and Gradient Black are the three best themes in my opinion, offering simple color schemes and minimal distraction.

Google Presentations will also directly import PowerPoint files, and the results look pretty decent. Text colors, slide designs, and text formatting remains entirely intact. Unfortunately, due to the limitations of Google Presentations, all text build and slide transitions are lost upon import. However, I was surprised to see that the slides are completely editable.


Garr Reynolds should be proud...

All of this leads up to the ability to share your presentations anywhere you have an internet connection. A published presentation will be assigned a unique URL you can send to others, or you can play the presentation directly from the Google application in a maximized browser window. Furthermore, you can share your presentations with others and collaborate on editing the slides – an especially welcome feature for those times you have to collaborate on a presentation, even if you only use Google Presentations to draft the slides before finalizing them in a dedicated application like Impress or Keynote.

The Limitations

I've already touched on some of this, but these tools are very basic. Don't expect to find automatic builds, slide animations, object paths, clip art, word art, or drawing tools here. If you create your presentation entirely within the Google app, you will be forced to keep things very simple – which might actually be a good thing. While others might bemoan the lack of eye candy in Google Presentations, I think such a Spartan feature set forces users to really think about content and how to present it meaningfully rather than impressively.

One of the only real issues I ran into was the lack of support for text builds. If you enter a list onto a slide, then the entire list will appear at once. This is where the Duplicate command comes in useful. To work around this limitation, I created a bullet-filled slide, then duplicated it several times. Next, I deleted the text I did not want on the slides leading up to the entire list, creating the illusion of text builds. This will greatly increase the physical size of your slide deck, but the difference should be transparent to viewers.


notice the expanding list in the slide sorter

The other major limitation comes from the nature of sharing over the internet. Depending on the connection, your slides may hesitate before loading. Also, some design backgrounds may look pixelated when scaled up to higher resolutions, and the browser window will always be present. This can be somewhat alleviated with browsers that feature full-screen modes.

Final Thoughts

One might be left wondering if it's possible to create attractive slides in Google Presentations at all, and that all depends on what you are looking for aesthetically. Simple can be beautiful, and Google Presentations epitomizes simplicity at this point. It's features are extremely basic, but it is functional and provides one more way to have access to your slides in various settings. It may not serve as a primary presentation package, but it excels at being a good backup or a convenient way of collaborating and drafting slides.

Let me conclude with one more screenshot and hint.

looking like Keynote

In this deck, each slide merely has an image placed upon it. I took a completed Keynote presentation, exported all of the slides (and builds) as individual images, and then uploaded each image onto its individual slide. Now I have a presentation that is accessible anywhere but still looks like it does when presented from my laptop. Again, thanks to the ability to upload images, you don't have to feel constrained by the limited editing tools provided by Google Presentations.

A few years ago, I would have never dreamed I'd be editing slides in a web browser. Google Presentations, while limited in many ways, is a great backup and collaboration tool, and it is serviceable as a composition application as well. The sparse feature set may be unsettling at first, but you might find yourself getting more work done without the many distractions of PowerPoint. Google Presentations is not a competitor to dedicated slide applications. Rather it is an augmentation to those programs, and it makes for a fine addition to the tool set of any presenter.

Other Perspectives

• Ars Technica: Hands On with Google Presentations
• Macworld: First Look: Google Presentations

Other Online Presentation Tools

I discovered these while researching this post and thought I would pass them on. Perhaps I will test these out as well.

• Zoho Show
• Preezo

Like Google, both of these services require you to sign up for a free account.

Tags: software, google, online tools

Between Simply Gospel and Simply Presentation, I'm going to be reposting the presentations that used to be showcased on the previous version of this site. However, they are going to be a little different than before (and if you found the quasi-hidden page on the old site, you know what I'm talking about already). Instead of being a series of silently progressing slides, the presentations will be uploaded as slides with narration. This workflow came out of a podcasting experiment, so I've christened this "slidecasting." (If someone else has already come up with that word, I won't feel bad.)

The Process

Beginning in Keynote, I export all of my slides as images, checking the option to create multiple images for slides with multiple builds. These images get saved into their own folder folder, so I don't lose track of them.

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If you are using PowerPoint, you can do this by selecting "Save As..." from the File menu and choosing one of the graphics options from the list of options at the bottom of the pane. The only limitation is that separate images will not be created for slides with multiple builds.



Once the images are all saved, open iMovie and drop them all into the clips pane. From there, you can drag them into the iMovie timeline in the order you want. Once the images are in the timeline and you get recording, you may want to remove some images of text and graphics builds to simplify the process.

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If your slides pan and zoom while your video plays, this means iMovie is applying the Ken Burns effect by default. To remove this effect, select all of your clips in the timeline, and choose "Show Photo Settings" from the Photos tab of the Media pane. In the resultant dialog window, make sure "Ken Burns Effect" is unchecked.

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Finally, use the record button in the Audio tab of the Media pane to record your voice. I recommend using an external microphone, and record small portions of your talk at a time. Double-clicking a clip in the timeline allows you to edit the length of that clip to better match your voice. (In the dialog box, the time is formatted in minutes : seconds : frames.)

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Once you finish this, you're ready to export the video as a QuickTime movie and share it with the world. Just choose Share > QuickTime from the system menu and follow the instructions. You might want to perform some trial-and-error with the settings to find a result you like at a reasonable file size.

Some Limitations

• Any media embedded into the slides will not play. You can just add that media to the iMovie timeline.
  
  
• PowerPoint and Keynote slide and build animations will be lost. This isn't a big deal.
  
  
• iMovie does not have the same selection of transitions as Keynote or PowerPoint if the loss of animations bothers you.
  
  
• I'm assuming WIndows Movie Maker can do all of the iMovie steps is you are using Windows, but I have no experience with that application.

Wrapping Up

A presentation is more than just the slides and/or the handouts. You are the central figure, but the ways we usually share presentations eliminates "you" from the experience. Hopefully, this method provides you a way to share your slides in a more meaningful way with your intended audience.

Tags: software, keynote, how-to

The most recent QuickTime update has two important changes that affect Keynote users.

1. A bug has been fixed that would prevent interactive QT movies from playing properly on Windows machines.
2. Users can now view files in fullscreen without purchasing a QT Pro license.

KeynoteUser has some more details if you are interested. Either fire up Software Update to snag the update or grab it from Apples' site for Mac or Windows.

Tags: software

The Wall Street Journal commemorates the birth of PowerPoint this week twenty years ago. Believe it or not, PowerPoint was initially developed for the Macintosh as Presenter by Forethought, Inc. – later re-christening the software as PowerPoint. Microsoft would buy PowerPoint later that year, but the Windows version would not come out until 1990. Unlike the other staples of what has become Microsoft Office, PowerPoint has seen very few competitors emerge over the years.

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powerpoint 1.0 and powerpoint 2007 (both images from wikipedia)

For better of worse, PowerPoint has become synonymous with how we present information today. Even working primarily with Apple Keynote when on a Mac and OpenOffice Impress when on a PC, I still slip into the habit of referring to my slides as my "PowerPoint." It has become a massive time-saver for adding visual aids to a presentation as well as presenting those aids in a medium more easily shared with many. Unfortunately, as the WSJ article points out, PowerPoint has seen its fair share of abuse.

As any tool, we have to accept the fact that PowerPoint is not meant to supplant the presenter – no more than a hydraulic lift can replace an engineer. Too many PowerPoint decks are created as standalone documents that actually fail in the realm of "visual aid." Instead they present overwhelming blocks of data that end of distracting from the presentation due to the effort the audience has to commit in digesting everything.

Even if a tool is misused, it can still be a good tool. As Garr Reynolds points out in his post on PowerPoint's birthday:

We all agree that the majority of presentations given with PowerPoint “suck rotten eggs” ... [But] PowerPoint is not the cause of bad business presentations, but laziness and poor writing skills may be.

He points out that we should not blame Microsoft if our presentations are ineffective. Rather, we should reevaluate the way we prepare for the presentation. However, I have to agree with one commenter on the entry. Guillaume Gete writes:

However, I don't completely agree when you say : "Don't blame Microsoft". I believe strongly that Microsoft DOES have responsibility, not because it produces the tools that everybody uses, but also because it includes its own templates with it. These are presented (no pun intended) to anyone who opens the "Project library" which bangs at your face each time you open an Office app, and are full of advice one should *not* follow.

He has some good points, and I think Microsoft should rethink some of the templates and tips included with PowerPoint, but those are subjective opinions. My personal opinion is that the best presentations are made using the blank templates – avoiding anything but your personal vision to shine through.

PowerPoint continues to evolve, and with alternatives from Apple and OpenOffice (which is free) showing up, Microsoft has continued to refine and improve their presentation app. I'm still a Keynote junkie, but PowerPoint really launched, validated, and defines this genre of applications.

For more, check out Robert Gaskins Home Page. He was one of the creators of PowerPoint.

Tags: software, garr reynolds

When working in a rush or on a tight budget, Keynote is an easy solution for editing images that you might want to use in a document or on your website. You will not have near the options that you might have in an application like Photoshop, but it can be good for simple edits.

For this trick, just launch Keynote and drop the image you want to edit onto a blank slide that matches the background color the image will be placed upon. Remember, if your picture is stored in iPhoto, you can just use the Media Inspector to import the picture. Otherwise, you can drag-and-drop the picture from the directory it is stored in. Here's a quick example walkthrough of the process.

First, with the image in Keynote, mask the image. In this example, we'll mask with a shape. This involves drawing the shape. Then select both the shape and the image using shift-click or cmd-click on each.



Next, select "Mask With Shape" from the Format menu. Now adjust your image's mask. When you are happy with the results, click anywhere on the slide. Don't worry about messing up. You can always readjust the mask by double-clicking the image.



Finally, you can use the Graphic Inspector and the Adjust Image window to add shadows, borders, and reflections as well as adjust the exposure, saturation, and sharpness of the image.



There you have it. For comparison's sake, here is the original image right next to the modified image. Of course, an application like Photoshop will give you a great deal more functionality and flexibility, but Keynote is great for quick and simple image editing purposes.

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Tags: software, how-to

Some days, I feel more smart than others. The day I remembered this feature was not one of those days.

In this blog, I feel it is critically important for me to visually demonstrate what I am advocating in terms of slide design, so there are hundreds of screenshots littering the various posts in this blog. Up until recently, my process of posting sample slides has remained the same: make the slide in Keynote, enter presentation mode, take a screenshot, post on the site. This is not only needlessly complicated, but it doesn't produce good results on my MacBook Pro.

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the same slide - two different screens

Of course it all comes down to the aspect ratio, and I found myself adding another step to the process of slide shots – cropping the image. Then it hit me. This could be much, much easier. In fact, Keynote can do all the work for me.



In an open presentation, choose "Export..." from the File menu. This will cause a dialog sheet to appear with several choices: QuickTime, PowerPoint, PDF, Images, Flash, iDVD, and Safari. Choose "Images."



From here, you can choose which slide(s) you want to export, the format, and the image quality. The slides will be exported at the same resolution as the theme default. In Keynote, this will be 800x600 or 1024x768 most of the time.

Last, the slides need to be given a name, and now they are ready to be posted to a blog. (RapidWeaver allows me to scale the images down within the program. You might need to use a simple editor otherwise.) I only wish I had remembered this option months ago when I started this blog! The silver lining? I get to post a tip that might be helpful to you.

Tags: software, how-to

Like PowerPoint, Keynote lends itself well to those purely photographic experiences. Maybe it's a project for an anniversary or birthday that chronicles happy memories. Perhaps the pictures capture a significant event or milestone in one's life. Whatever the reason, these photo montages are fun to assemble and even more enjoyable to share. With Keynote, one method of sharing these projects is by creating a DVD, and you can get this done using nothing but the software that comes standard with every modern Mac.
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The photo presentation I'm using as an example was played at our fifth graders' completion ceremony last year. It contained 155 slides and about 275 images (not counting built text on some slides). This is a big slideshow, but I'm going to try to give you a good idea on how to get from blank slides to a DVD you can share with family and friends.
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Organize in iPhoto

If you are going to be using several images in Keynote, it is a good idea to get them all organized in iPhoto first. This way, you can directly access the images from Keynote's Media Browser rather than having to constantly switch between your presentation and a folder of images. (This also works with the most recent version of Aperture.)



Before I import any images, I set up a folder named after the school I work at. After that, I create albums within that folder named after the different fifth grade teachers, events, or other related category. For example, last year some of my albums may have been titled "Shanks," "YMCA Camp," and "Other Teachers." By the time all photos are imported, I will usually have between 500 and 750 images catalogued, and, hopefully, every staff member and every fifth grade student will be accounted for.

Composite in Keynote

Next comes the fun step: putting it all together! Needless to say, not very picture is used, but Keynote gets a workout in this process nevertheless. For the sake of article length, I'm going to assume you have a basic understanding of how Keynote works and you know how to insert, adjust, and mask images from within the application. Here I'm going to focus on some tips to help you through this process and optimize your presentation for viewing on a standard television screen.

Watch Your Space. When your Keynote presentation gets viewed on a standard television, not every inch of the slide will be visible. Plan for the space that will be off-screen. Personally, I use an overlay from Keynote User that sets a red line around the TV-screen borders. You can go here to get it.


What you see versus what a TV will see.

Start Timing Early. When setting a presentation to auto-play, Keynote has limited options, but you can take control of those options with the Build Inspector. Use the "More Options" pane to fine tune your settings, and make sure every build is set to transition automatically so you can check timing with your music selection. Just launch the song in iTunes, and play your presentation. This will give a decent idea of how the music will fit with your visuals. If you have multiple songs, set up a Playlist ahead of time.

On this note, you might be wondering why I'm not recommending using the Document Inspector to set the audio before playing the presentation – excluding the need for iTunes (or other audio source). Simply, if you use the Document Inspector, two things may get in the way. First, it can be tricky using this method to select more than one song from iTunes. Second, the audio may become disjointed or choppy if the times for the slideshow and the music do not match.

Watch Your Transitions. Depending on how you choose to encode, some transitions may be problematic. Personally, I tend to avoid Burn, Drop, Push Up, and Push Down slide transitions. Drop and Fly-In builds may also cause problems, but using H.264 has reduced the issues I've had with these. (I use MPG-4 for the site, so I still avoid these by force of habit.)

Basically, if your plan your slideshow out from the beginning, knowing that a TV will be the final destination for sharing your work, you should be in good shape. Patience is key, though. The first couple of times I went through this process, I ran into several problems. The more I've done it, the smoother the process has become.

Export to iMovie

Once your document is complete, select Export from the File menu. When the sheet appears, make sure you have selected QuickTime. The default settings should be fine for importing into iMovie, but you may have to tweak slide and build durations to get a length that most closely matches your music. Unfortunately, this step can be quite time consuming unless you have a G5 or Core Duo equipped Mac.



Before you take the next step, view your file in QuickTime to make sure everything looks okay. Now is the time to find glitches – not when you are already in iMovie. This step can get frustrating at times, but it will be more frustrating if you find an error after you took the time to import this file into iMovie!

Next, open iMovie, and drag the QuickTime file into the timeline at the bottom of the window. If you are planning on adding various clips, you may want to drop it in the clips well instead.



Once in iMovie, I really only worry about two additions. First, I use the media pane to add my music to the timeline as well as the audio clips of interviews I conducted with the children. (This usually involves some volume tweaking as well.) Then I add chapter markers to the movie that will become selectable on the DVD. To add a chapter, you move the slider in the timeline to the point you want a chapter to begin and click "Add Marker" in the chapters pane.

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Once you are finished in iMovie, it's time to click "Share" in the menu bar and select "iDVD." iDVD will automatically launch, and your iMovie project will be imported.

iDVD: The Final Step

The last step is the easiest but the most time-consuming. In iDVD, use the themes pane to select a menu theme. (I'm using Reflection Black in this screenshot). Next, use the media pane to add images to the menu. Finally, click on the shutter next to the volume slider to burn your project to a DVD. Warning: This will take a while. Don't plan on baby-sitting the computer while this is going on. Furthermore, if you are making multiple copies, it takes less time to create subsequent copies than the first one.

Once iDVD ejects your disc, you are done. Pop the DVD into a standard player, sit back, and enjoy your masterpiece!

Technical Notes:

• In Keynote, if H.264 is giving you problems, try MPG-4 at 24 fps. This usually does the trick if I'm having problems exporting.
• In iMovie and iDVD, your project will look pixelated on the computer screen. This is normal because it is being converted into a standard TV resolution, which is much lower than your computer's resolution.
• I have never tested one of my projects on an HD-TV. I don't know how it will look on one of these, but I know they look fine on standard televisions.
• This process may not work with iMovie '08 and later.

Tags: software, how-to

Many of Keynote's default slide backgrounds are pretty good. In fact, I'm very fond of the background found in Apple's Storyboard theme (pictured). However, using that background on other objects can prove tricky.



What I wanted to do in revising a presentation was create a more random layout for my built text. Pictured below is the original slide followed by the outcome where I used a foreground object that uses the Storyboard background. This looks easier than it really was.

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In order to pull something like this off, you need to know a little bit about how Mac OS X stores certain application information. Many Mac OS X applications are "packages." Put simply, this means what you see as an application is actually a series of directories that makes the program work all bundled up together. If an application is a package, the command "Show Package Contents" will be available in the contextual menu if you right-click the icon.

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If you select to show contents, a new window will open with a set of vaguely named folders. (You may have to open a folder called "Contents" to see these depending on the application.) The information we are looking for is in the folder called "Resources." Don't mess with anything in this folder, you are just looking for another folder called "Themes."



Once you open this folder, you'll see a bunch of Keynote theme files with the extension ".kth." If you double-click on any of these themes, Keynote will open a new presentation using the theme you selected. That's not what you want to happen. Again, "Show Package Contents" comes to the rescue. Once you find a file called "theme_plain.tiff" (where theme is the name of the theme you are browsing), copy and paste that file to someplace you will remember. Do not move the image itself! Use copy and paste.

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Now that we have the backgrounds we want copied to another location, we can use them on objects in our presentation. First, create your object. Then, using the Inspector, set the object to "Image Fill." Then you can browse for the image you want, or you can drag it into the image well on the inspector. Choose "Scale to Fill" to make sure the image fills the entire object, and you're done.

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If you think you're going to use these backgrounds often, you should probably make a folder or an iPhoto album in which to store them all for easy access. You can also find image resources for charts and graphs this way, and this same trick got me the sticky note image seen in my second slide at the top of the post. (It came from opening up the Stickies Dashboard widget.) A final word of warning though – messing in the resource folders of application packages can really mess up the program if you move or delete anything. Remember, if you find something you want to use, copy it, and paste that copy to another location.

Update: I've discovered this method does not work for Keynote 1 themes. To extract a legacy theme's background, follow the steps above, but now you are looking for either "theme_bk.pdf" of "theme_cover.pdf." (Again, theme represents the name of the theme you are browsing.) I hope this helps some of my readers who got confused when opening up themes like Parchment!

Tags: software, how-to

File this entry under "handy tips" in your brain. Keynote uses layered backgrounds in all of its themes, and these are very handy for quickly adding images to your presentation without having to create masks or custom frames. This is how it works:

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Nifty, huh? All I have to do is drag the photo into the designated area, and I have a framed or inset image. It's not terribly flexible, but it is a good way to get nice results quickly. However, in many themes, the cutouts could be suitable for any content you might want to draw attention to – not just pictures. Here are some examples:

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In the first image, a cutout is being used to give a graph a more organic feel. (The "droplet" is an image cutout in that slide.) In the second image, the photo cutout is being used to frame a quote. In the third, I am using the cutouts to mask an image, but I am using two separate cutouts for one image.

Many third party themes have very creative cutouts in their slides allowing for some unique uses. Don't let the label "photo cutout" limit you. If the presentation you are giving warrants it, get creative with your use of cutouts. This is just one more way you can let built-in features of applications like Keynote enhance your presentation slides.

As an aside, all of these screenshots (except the Clemenceau quote) use third party themes from Jumsoft. Visit my Presentations page for more theme resource links.

Tags: software, graphics

On the Macintosh platform, there are two major choices for creating slide presentations: Microsoft PowerPoint and Apple Keynote. There are other alternatives, but many of these are basically identical to PowerPoint in interface and features.

Just like choosing an operating system, a digital music player, or even a pair of shoes, many objective and subjective reasons can affect the software you use to create a presentation. My personal preference is to compose my presentations in Keynote, and I thought I'd take a moment to write about why I prefer Apple's relatively young slide-ware application.

The Interface

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Keynote + PowerPoint

Quite simply, Keynote is much easier on the eyes than the Mac version of PowerPoint (which, incidentally, is nicer looking than the current Windows version). Keynote is a very elegant looking application that looks right at home on Mac OS X. It's interface is clean and uncluttered, doing little to distract from the main workspace. PowerPoint, on the other hand, can become a mess of toolbars and pallets. There is a lot of visual distraction going on here.

I also like how the slides are visually arranged along the side of Keynote's window. In PowerPoint, all I get is a bunch of text or slide numbers. To visually navigate my slides in PowerPoint, I have to change to Slide Sorter view. (Incidentally, you can view your slides this way in Keynote as well by choosing Light Table from the View menu. I didn't know that until recently.)

The Little Touches

Keynote produces nice looking results far more easily than PowerPoint. In the screenshots above, you can see a reflective effect under the image. No Photoshop was involved, nor did I have to invoke any tricky image reversal with alpha-masking techniques. How is this done? By checking a box that says "Reflection." Additionally, shadows are handled much more smoothly; transparency is fully supported, and there is a greater variety of 3D transitions available for Keynote.

Another big bonus in Keynote is the ability to mask images with various shapes rather than just cropping them. I have noticed, though, that you can "cut out" rectangles and circles in PowerPoint, but the tool is still no where near as flexible as Keynote's "Mask with Shape" ability.

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masking and aligning

When resizing a photograph or other imported image, Keynote maintains its dimensions by default – the entire image resizes proportionally, not just the side you are dragging, and Keynote shows alignment guides that help you see how your images and text line up.

Other Bonuses

Keynote offers many ways of sharing your presentation besides its native format. Flash, QuickTime, PPT, and PDF are among the options when exporting Keynote slides. Someone doesn't necessarily have to have Keynote to view my presentations. (In fact, Keynote is a good place to start if you want to make an iMovie project that contains a bunch of still images.)

Finally, Keynote works like a Mac application should. It talks to the other iApps seamlessly – the photos in the screenshot above ("Masking with a shape.") are all in my iPhoto library, and I can choose music from iTunes or iMovie projects I have saved. Furthermore, Mac-standard keyboard commands for aligning and formatting text, managing windows and documents, and opening up Apple's color picker all function properly. These commands can be hit-or-miss when using PowerPoint.

Conclusion

These are some of the reasons Keynote has become my presentation software of choice. It was quite a transition when I switched from PowerPoint, but it was definitely worth the effort. Keynote certainly lagged behind Powerpoint in terms of features for a couple of years, but, after only three versions, Apple's presentation program has matured into a great alternative to PowerPoint, raising the bar for what is expected of slide-ware applications on the Macintosh platform.

If you have access to a Mac (like at a local Apple Store), I suggest you take Keynote for a whirl. You might be surprised what you can do with it.

Tags: keynote, software